An ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time.
A computer game designed by a troubled young woman from Cincinnati becomes the unexpected link between her 1983 self, a robot, and people from a far-future Earth.
Nineteen-year-old Becks loves computers; governed by a language and a logic she understands, they give her the invisibility she craves. Better still, they make her feel close to her Uncle Ben, a computer-game programmer who sometimes writes code with her. When Ben dies, he leaves Becks a half-finished game about an astronaut intended to help his niece process her grief. What neither of them realizes is that the completed game will play a key role in a seafaring adventure that takes place 600 years in the future. Weaving together multiple stories and forms (such as mythical, epistolary, and computer-game narratives), and told from different perspectives spanning centuries, Elan’s novel offers an epic journey across time and space wrapped in a mystery. The game Becks creates, Homebound, becomes beloved by many others, including Tamar Portman, a Berkeley bioengineering professor, who, in the late 21st century, creates a type of advanced robot called an Aye. Like Becks' game, Tamar’s creation goes beyond anything she expects when one Aye, Chaya, reveals awareness of their own lonely singularity. The robot survives into a future 400 years from the time of their making to become a crew member on a cargo ship trading in whatever “ghost-things from the past” its crew can salvage from the ocean. As Chaya bonds with Yesiko, the reluctant captain, they become driven to understand a story about a spaceship captain “written into [their] memory in the earliest days of [their] existence.” Unique and complex, this novel tells an unexpectedly moving story of love, loss, and how the past shapes—and haunts—our present.
An ingenious narrative that explores the meaning of love and interconnectedness across time.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781668201732
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.
Stockett heads to Mississippi for another historical novel about feisty women.
This time, perhaps recalling criticisms of cultural appropriation in The Help (2009), she sticks to feisty white women, with one exception. The setting is Oxford in 1933. For two miserable years, 11-year-old Meg has lived in “the Orphan,” a county asylum for parentless girls. Chairlady Garnett—a villain so one-note she’d twirl a mustache if she had one—makes it her mission to ostracize the older girls she deems unadoptable, stigmatizing them as offspring of the “feebleminded” mothers who abandoned them. She particularly has it in for smart, sassy Meg, who refuses to believe her mother’s mysterious disappearance was deliberate. Elsewhere in Oxford, Birdie Calhoun comes to visit her sister Frances, who married a wealthy banker, to ask for money on behalf of their mother and grandmother back in Footely. Frances isn’t thrilled by this reminder of her impoverished small-town origins. But she’s trying to climb up in Oxford society by volunteering at the Orphan, the asylum’s books need to be done before the state inspector shows up in a few weeks, and Birdie is a bookkeeper. Having neatly arranged to keep Birdie in town and draw these two storylines together, Stockett goes on to spin a compulsively readable yarn with enough plot for a half-dozen novels. Birdie and Meg become friends, Meg is adopted despite Garnett’s best efforts, Meg’s mother turns up at the Orphan demanding to know where her child is—and that’s less than a quarter of the way through a long, winding narrative that keeps piling on more dramatic developments until all loose ends are neatly, if hastily, wrapped up in the final pages. Stockett might be making a point about Southern women facing facts and standing up for themselves, but mostly this is just a satisfyingly twisty tale that should make a great miniseries.
Fans of Stockett’s bestselling debut will love this engaging follow-up.Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9781954118812
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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